Information handling systems, such as data processing systems and computer systems, typically include storage disk drives (e.g., an array of disk drives). For example, disk drives may be communicatively coupled to the information handling system for data storage and retrieval. The disk drives are utilized with the information handling systems to increase data availability and storage capacity, to provide performance flexibility, and to increase data protection.
As the number of disk drives on a RAID system increases, the bit error rate per disk drive also increases and on the other hand the likelihood of disk drives prone to faults and failures also increases. In existing methods, one or more of the disk drives may be configured as a hot spare. The hot spare operates as a replacement disk drive when a failure of a disk drive occurs. Thus, the hot spare generally sits idle until one of the disk drives physically fails which causes the hot spare to be rebuilt as a copy of the failed disk drive. In this case, rebuilds can take an enormous amount of time which costs valuable time to customers and factory production environments. A smaller disk drive will take lesser time to rebuild compared to a larger disk drive. For example, when RAID technology was introduced, the disk drive sizes were in the range of approximately 36 GB, and since then the sizes have crossed that mark and the disk drives today are in magnitude of much more than 500 GB and even terabytes. Hence in case of a disk drive failure, the rebuild time for such a disk drive can even take few days. In this case, for instance, a hot spare kicks in and starts rebuilding from the other disk drive in the RAID array. Further, if another disk drive in the RAID array fails while the hot spare is rebuilding, this will be a catastrophic situation which will result in data loss.
Since the rebuild does not begin until the disk drive actually fails, the system typically has to devote several resources and processing time to rebuilding the disk drive under a standard rebuild algorithm. In addition to the time and resources consumed during a failed disk drive rebuild, the potential for loss of data or other information can be significantly increased. This loss of data may be more significant if the failed disk drive happens to be in a RAID 0 stripe set.
The drawings described herein are for illustration purposes only and are not intended to limit the scope of the present disclosure in any way.